Tag #107226 - Interview #78446 (Feliks Nieznanowski)

Then I found out that the Union of Polish Patriots [ZPP] [34] had been set up and was signing people up for return to Poland. I met one more boy like myself, a victim, his name was Furman, from Pinsk [town in eastern Poland, presently in Belarus]. Interestingly, he was a Jew, and his father had been a sailor in the Pinsk Fleet. We were together in Ukraine. We were in Dnieprodherzhinsk then [industrial city in Ukraine], that’s a dozen kilometers from Dniepropetrovsk [industrial city in south-central Ukraine]. And one day he says, ‘You know, let’s go to Dniepropetrovsk, we’ll find that ZPP office.’ And so we’ve found it, are turning up, talking in Russian. They ask us, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I’m from Warsaw, and he’s from Pinsk,’ I say, ‘Okay, but how do we know it? Do you have any documents?’ I only had a school ID. And what does your friend have? And he had nothing. So I say, ‘He’s been with me all the time, since the beginning of the war.’ No, he has to present some document. And so that school ID saved me, and him they didn’t let go and he had to stay in the Soviet Union. No one gave you the benefit of the doubt there.

When I registered there, I told them I had a brother in Magnitogorsk, and that I knew he had been registered with the ZPP there. They checked that, and found out he was no longer in Magnitogorsk but in Moscow. He had been brought to Moscow alongside a group of Jews who were to prepare for repatriation to Poland [35]. Because there was a problem – what to do with the Jews who were in Russia and when they return to Poland, where would they go? They had no families, no houses, nothing. So a group was set up in Moscow to prepare ‘aliyah’ from the Soviet Union to Poland. My brother and others had been brought there. He later found himself in the Lublin government [36], under the protection of Modzelewski [Zygmunt Modzelewski (1900-1954): communist politician, during WWII in the Soviet Union, 1947-1951 foreign minister of communist Poland].